Rather, their obscurity may be attributed primarily to their radical divergence from the dominant tradition of Petrarch illustrations. A case in point is the most complete study of the Trionfi to date, Prince d’Essling’s and Eugène Müntz’s standard study of Petrarch illustrations (1902). Although dutifully mentioned (p. 250) and listed (p. 276) only one illustration is reproduced, but that one, Salomon’s Triumph of Chastity, is placed in the book as a decorative finial at the end of the preface (p. VIII) disengaged from its text. The obscurity of these illustrations was further guaranteed by the fact that they had no immediate or subsequent effect upon later images of Petrarch’s Triumphs. (One of the rare instances in which Salomon’s illustrations had no influence.) True, Guillaume Rouillé’s versions (Lyon, 1550) borrow their cameo-like appearance from Salomon’s images, but Rouillé’s artist, Pierre Eskrich, returned to the processional format of Giolito’s Venetian editions. Thus Salomon’s Petrarchan emblems mark the end of a tradition; in the final analysis it was the potential for glorious display and baroque exuberance that made the processional formula live into the seventeenth century.

The small size of Salomon’s Petrarch emblems should not be taken as a symptom of small significance, however, nor would the fact that they cannot be counted among the ancestors of major baroque triumphal schemes be used as an argument against their consideration. The following pages shall demonstrate that these Triumphs are repositories of the concerns of their own age, that they embody concerns of sixteenth-century France in an age of transition, caught, as it were, between the medieval desire to moralize all elements of human life and the new-felt freedom of man to choose his spiritual place in the universe.

Salomon’s Petrarchan images fuse two pictorial traditions, one which developed in Italy, notably, but not exclusively in illustrations of the Trionfi, and which evolved a new allegorical language and new images for the gods, and another, a French tradition of moralized images, used to express the triumph of Virtues over the Vices which was developed out of a symbolic language once used to illustrate the Psychomachia of Prudentius, but which may have become fused with medieval images of man’s place in the wheel of fortune (a common medieval theme) and adapted to create an iconography for the earliest French images of Petrarch’s Triumphs which begin to appear in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

That Salomon’s Petrarchan images are cast into the popular form of the imaged conceit as it was given form in emblem books only indicates how the vogue for emblem literature, justified and explained by neo-Platonic, hermetic and classical theory, acts to transmit and preserve wisdoms of a past era which here are given a new form, turned into an encyclopedia of sorts, which condenses these "truths" of the past into a single body of knowledge. This "emblemification" of knowledge may indicate that the "truths" contained therein are past discussion--that they are self-evident. [cf. N.Frye.] Be that as it may, the use of emblems in Petrarch’s Triumphs places its morals firmly into the grasp of those who have a use for such popular knowledge. In this respect they fulfill the function and promise of the printing press in the Renaissance. But at the same time they perpetuate by "sloganizing" (to use a modern term) and distilling the inherited wisdom of the middle ages.

It was only at the start of the sixteenth century when the first French images of Petrarch’s Trionfi began to appear. Whereas Italy had witnessed a lively evolution of the theme during the second half of the fifteenth century, those images seem to have had almost no effect upon French imagery until the earliest years of the new century. By that time, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Italy could supply a variety of differing interpretations of Petrarch’s popular theme, ranging from narrative and ceremonial images to strictly emblematic ones.

It is understandable that before the French invasions of Italy such motifs, formulated to decorate cassoni and other artifacts of Italian social life, might have had little or no influence upon French culture, yet one should not be surprised to find that when the Trionfi do first appear in France they are awarded a place in deluxe manuscripts and in expensive tapestries. Thus, in their own way these new images are evidence of a court society translating the symbols of luxury native to Italy into media traditionally characteristic of northern wealth and fine taste. The above notwithstanding, it is surprising, indeed, to find that at this time Petrarch’s cycle found an entirely new life for itself in France, a use not in any way prefigured by the past history of the theme in Italy; that is, in Renaissance France these six allegorical triumphs come to be used as a means of giving form to expressly Medieval ideals, clothing traditional moral and theological programs in modern stylish garments.

Consequently, it is to be expected that when French images of the Trionfi do appear, Italian precedents become little more than stimuli for French artists who were quick to adapt the theme to their own purposes while instilling their own values. Some of these new images patently derive their imagery from the processional program developed in Italy, but of equal importance are those cycles which renounce the processional scheme and, instead, cast their versions of the Trionfi in forms traditionally used to depict the relationships between personifications of the Virtues and Vices. Thus, from the onset, French Petrarchan triumphal images depart dramatically from those provided by Italy; indeed, it would take another half-century for the lessons of Italy to be accepted in their entirety--as they were in the Triumph illustrations appearing in the editions of Guillaume Rouillé published in Lyon beginning in 1550. Indeed, this moment coincides with the interest in Petrarch’s vernacular poetry among French poets. Salomon’s trionfi images, published by de Tournes, no doubt inspired by Maurice Scève prefigure France’s deep interest in Petrarch’s Italian poetry and corresponds to Clément Marot’s role as a precursor to the Pleiade.

It is significant that when Rouillé produced his first illustrated Trionfi in 1550 (being the same year as the second edition of Salomon’s illustrations, and just three years after their first appearance), he framed his images in the classicizing oval cameo shapes introduced by Salomon, the artist working for Jean de Tournes, Rouillé’s Lyonais rival in the publication of illustrated editions. But by rejecting Salomon’s unusual triumphal emblems, Rouillé displays his preference for the Italian iconography. For his images, he turns to the processional compositions that the Venetian publisher Gioliot (his teacher) had been using since 1543. Giolito’s three sets of Trionfi images were to have profound effects on Petrarchan iconography in the second half of the century, but at mid-century in France, Guillaume Rouillé’s rejection of the modish emblematics of Salomon’s Trionfi pictures (in spite of their obvious classicizing aspects) is portentous, for it is one symptom of a final break with the past. Indeed, Rouillé’s Lyon editions had become such a fixture among Italian language editions of Petrarch that in 1564, when Nicolò Bevilacqua published an edition of small format in Venice, he had no difficulty quoting Rouillé’s signed dedicatory introduction, although the rest of the edition is different.